6 ms·

Done, and Gets Things Smart

137 points by dill_day 18y ago

sanj 18y ago
I disagree with one of Yegge's key points: "How do you hire someone who's smarter than you? How do you tell if someone's smarter than you? This is a problem I've thought about, over nearly twenty years of interviewing, and it appears that the answer is: you can't. You just have to get lucky." Is this really the case? I feel like I've met dozens of people over the years and I can tell you that they're better programmers than me. Or more organized. Or more talents (at business, coding, wine tasting, whatever). Or just plain smarter. Is this just a question of being humbled by many talented folks? Is it that I have some hugely overvalued self worth? Do I have less of myself tied into my code? Don't get me wrong, my ego does take a small hit (though less and less over the years), and I do console myself in some small way. "Well, at least I can play the ukulele with my toes better than she can!" But, c'mon, can you really not put your own ego aside long enough to hire people to make your company successful?
- narag 18y ago
  I also have recognized that a handful of guys were smarter. But that's after working with them. Sometimes I realized how smart they were after I was elsewhere, found a problem that they had solved and found out how hard it was. A superheroe makes things look easy. Would I spot one of them in an interview? Not sure, but I think so. But that's just because I'm supersmart myself ;-)
- lutorm 18y ago
  It is the case. It's like that pg essay about how everyone recognizes how languages lower level than the one they work in are sooo primitive, but higher-level ones (ie lisp in the essay) just look weird. You just don't see what that would be good for. It's the same with insanely smart people. They just don't make sense to you, because you can't follow. If you observe their output for a while, you'll see, but from just talking to them, it'll be difficult.
  - sanj 18y ago
    I still disagree. I've met lots of weird people. A small subset of them are smart. You get better at telling the difference over time.
DenisM 18y ago
warning: 5247 words.
- pchristensen 18y ago
  Everybody frickin' knows that Yegge writes a lot. He even wrote about how he does that on purpose. Now, lets start complaining every time pg writes an essay with no pictures.
  - DenisM 18y ago
    Please point out where exactly I am complaining. And not everyone knows who this Yegge person is, much else keeps track about his writing habbits.
dhotson 18y ago
A great read. Steve Yegge is a super smart guy. I personally think his longish style is great. I like to be able to read an article for a good 20 minutes. I wish more bloggers wrote articles with as much depth and passion as Stevey. Paul Graham's tight editing style is great too.. don't get me wrong. :)
- dfranke 18y ago
  Agreed. It really worries me that even this crowd by-and-large doesn't have enough of an attention span to cope with Yegge. Does anyone read books any more?
  - deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]
  - d0mine 18y ago
    1. "Steve's stuff strikes me as a stream-of-consciousness, spellcheck and then post, type of style." http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=219653 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=219653 2. "Mes Révérends Pères, mes lettres n'avaient pas accoutumé de se suivre de si près, ni d'être si étendues. Le peu de temps que j'ai eu a été cause de l'un et de l'autre. Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte." Bribes: Petit Dictionnaire des Citations http://www.bribes.org/temps.htm http://www.bribes.org/temps.htm A loose translation of the above quote: "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter." From 1. and 2. it follows: Succinctness takes more effort. Yegge took no effort. All other being equal a succinct text is preferable.
    - LogicHoleFlaw 18y ago
      I don't think it follows that Yegge took no effort. In fact, I suspect that the rough draft of his post was quite a bit longer. Imagine the reader shock to read that one!
- yef 18y ago
  Long is fine if that's what it takes to make the point. I learned to keep things as concise as possible to avoid losing the reader. The side benefit is that it forces the writer to clarify and distill his thoughts. Most of the work is done in rewriting. Steve's stuff strikes me as a stream-of-consciousness, spellcheck and then post, type of style. Do the 3rd and 4th paragraphs about jocks really contribute anything to his point?
mark_h 18y ago
Still long, but much more coherent and interesting than "Rhinos and Tigers". (I think I occasionally suffer from a second-order form of the Dunning-Kruger effect he references: I know I'm not that great... that must mean I'm more enlightened! The awareness of this doesn't help either; I think it's recursively deceiving.)
- olefoo 18y ago
  Come up with a witty name for this second-order effect and you too could join the ranks of the 'business consulting intelligentsia'.
- dill_day 18y ago
  This reminds me of Socrates: I went to one of those reputed to be wise... and when I conversed with him... it seemed to me that this man seemed to be wise, both to many other human beings and most of all to himself, but that he was not. I reasoned with regard to myself: I am wiser than this human being. For probably neither of us knows anything noble and good, but he supposes he knows something when he does not know, while I, just as I do not know, do not even suppose that I do.
- michaelneale 18y ago
  Coherent? Not sure about that. I can't even read this one, its just rambling. The other one was a transcription of a talk, so that explains why it reads funny. Is the summary really just as simple as its important that you hire people that get things done (firstly) but also in a smart way? Is that it?
auston 18y ago
Real eye opener for (re)evaluating yourself and the people around you.
bootload 18y ago
"... Done, and Gets Things Smart ..." I'm wondering if this is the Steve Yegge 20% time for google? Sure reads like, "come work for us ... it's one of the only way you will ever get to meet these coding gods & convince them to be co-founders" (DKE#2)
gaius 18y ago
This is one of the most valuable things about going to a good college. One day you're the top of your class at school without even trying, the next you're merely average - or maybe you (which is to say, me, in this story) need to work hard to even get to the level of average. It's a real eye-opener. Unfortunately, this effect wears off by the time you graduate, which is when you need it the most.
- swombat 18y ago
  Moreover, when you enter the workforce (if you do so in a normal company, not in a Google), you're once again surrounded by ... erm.. well, not incredibly brilliant people, and your arrogance comes back...
  - arebop 18y ago
    Part-time grad school helps with that.
    - rcoder 18y ago
      (Note: by "helps" I assume you mean to suggest that grad school should restore the humility that the workforce fails to inspire in programmers. If that's incorrect, then we are in fact 100% in agreement.) Only if you're in the right graduate program. There are a lot of MS (and even some PhD) students in CS departments who are just looking to increase their base salary. Furthermore, I've found that taking grad-school classes part-time is kind of an unfair advantage vs. being a full-time student. While I have time to really explore the material for the one or two classes I'm taking at once, while the full-time students are carrying a heavier course load, and TA'ing or teaching at least one more class, even if they're not working on their thesis or dissertation.
      - arebop 18y ago
        Right: by "helps" I meant to suggest that grad school restores the humility lost by immersion in a lackluster workforce. Anyway, it certainly had that effect on me. I guess I was in the right graduate program, because I think nearly all of my fellow students were there primarily for the intellectual stimulation and learning. I haven't heard anyone talking about increased earning power, and I certainly didn't expect to earn more with my degree. Sometimes I thought it would probably be easier to be a full-time student, because they don't have to commute to work or schedule around meetings and other work obligations (including the occasional death march). I believe that it's hard work being a PhD student, but I'm not so sure the full time MSCS students have it any harder than the part-timers who have to balance a corporate job.
danw 18y ago
Reminds me of this graph: http://media.tumblr.com/LTrEP2xA77v9i9w1wGBRQSjV_400.jpg http://media.tumblr.com/LTrEP2xA77v9i9w1wGBRQSjV_400.jpg (Originally from http://blog.gardeviance.org/2008/04/three-stages-of-expertise.html http://blog.gardeviance.org/2008/04/three-stages-of-expertis... but images aren't loading on his blog)
- eru 18y ago
  For me images do load on the blog.
Tichy 18y ago
So what percentage of hackers are superhackers? Did the rockstar job ads of YC startups get many applications (and where the applicants really rockstar coders)?
narag 18y ago
Who do you think that Google superheroe is?
- l0stman 18y ago
  Craig Silverstein?
  - shimon 18y ago
    Seems like a good guess based on http://news.cnet.com/2008-1024_3-5208228.html http://news.cnet.com/2008-1024_3-5208228.html
- cpr 18y ago
  Another theory is Jeff Dean: http://research.google.com/people/jeff/index.html http://research.google.com/people/jeff/index.html .
  - snprbob86 18y ago
    I'm almost certain it is Jeff Dean. During my 3 month internship at Google, his name came up EVERYWHERE. 1) He is a primary author on all of Google's major infrastructure-related publications (BigTable, MapReduce, etc) 2) I've seen his internal resume. It is CRAZY. 3) Just for fun/learning I took some time and wrote an internal web app which produced pie graphs showing peoples line counts navigable by directory. I didn't run it on the entire code base because Perforce is a dog, but what I did run it on, he dominated. 4) There is an internal web app listing Chuck Norris -style Jeff Dean facts. I learned that when Jeff Dean launches his profiler, loops unroll themselves in fear. That man is certainly Done, and Gets Things Smart. In fact, he has been 40 times more Done ever since he upgraded his keyboard to USB 2.0. Not to mention that during downtime, he alone handles all Google searches by hand.
    - AndyKelley 18y ago
      I want more Jeff Dean "facts"!
steveplace 18y ago
Quote: "That's right! All those loser kneebiter jocks in high school who played varsity and got all the girls and sported their big, winning, shark-white smiles as they barely jee-parlor-fran-saysed their way through the classes you coasted through: where are they now?" I'm a programmer, actually. edit: I was recruited by Miami, Alabama, Wake Forest, and a couple others, and had the potential to be one of the top tight ends in the state of Florida. Too bad I couldn't deal with the people.
- BrandonM 18y ago
  Interestingly, you seem to be admitting in the last sentence there that you are an outlier. Otherwise, I posit that you could deal with the people.
  - steveplace 18y ago
    I'm great with people. I just have little patience for poor management, and that's exactly what it was.
dreish 18y ago
One of the key details I like in this essay is that these people Yegge is referring to are experienced. That implies that for 95% of us, this is something we can still aspire to be someday. ("Every once in a very rare while you'll get a recent college grad in this category, but I think more often they tend to be experienced enough to make Gandalf feel young again.") (Incidentally, Yegge has probably done more to advance the art of speed-reading among programmers than any other single individual. Not that there's anything wrong with that.)
wensing 18y ago
I know a couple of DGTSers--two, to be precise. And the one introduced me to the other as 'he's smarter than me--I might write code quickly, but his code is beautiful.' I still can't comprehend that, but I accept it as true. My analogy for some of this is the tall-building problem (really, just perspective). Looking up at two skyscrapers, can you tell which one is taller? Sometimes. Other times they both just trail off into the sky and you're incapable of observing that one is a full 20, 30, 40 stories taller than the other. So it goes with smart people--that is, people that are less smart than you are going to think you're smart (and tell you so), but that's because they have no idea how tall the building next to you is. "If you only knew Isaac, then you wouldn't call me smart!". Actually, they probably would, because they can't even appreciate those extra levels of smartness.
- gills 18y ago
  My version of this has always been that some people are as smart relative to myself as I am to my cat. There's no way I can even comprehend the chasm between us.
  - parbo 18y ago
    The cat is most certainly smarter than you. It gets you to go to work and bring home food to it, while it sleeps twenty hours per day and spends the remaining four licking itself.
    - leoc 18y ago
      Where did it get its MBA?
    - gills 18y ago
      You're right. I should find a way to turn the tables ;).
AndyKelley 18y ago
Reading things like this makes me feel guilty for spending so much time reading blogs and not enough time actually creating anything.
- astine 18y ago
  And commenting on them!
Xichekolas 18y ago
> "Heck, the Markov-chain synopses of my blogs that people post in quasi-jest tend to look like I wrote them." ... Someone has been reading Hacker News.
hello_moto 18y ago
What's wrong with VP, Bank Manager, or whatnot? Not everybody wants to be a programmer. In fact, it is perceived that programmer has no life, awkward in social situation, and tend to have a child with autism.
- astine 18y ago
  I think that it was a subtle joke about how programmers tend to view non-programmers. -- Or it was a joke about how these people aren't really losers after all. Either way, it was a subtle snub on the 'cool to be a geek' thing and how programmer's arrogance can be their downfall. It leads up to the DK affect discussion, which is the second point of the article, we aren't as smart as we think they are and other people are smarter than we think they are.
  - hello_moto 18y ago
    Ah I see. Pardon my ignorance for not reading the whole thing and understanding the implicit points behind it.
figured 18y ago
I always enjoy reading essays that make me feel unconformable, it usually means that the author is forcing me to think.
andreyf 18y ago
PG: I think Paul Graham is probably a DGTSer; I mean, looking at his code in "ANSI Common Lisp" and "On Lisp", it's pretty clear that he's on a different plane of existence from me, and I've learned a ton from him. So he probably has more useful things to say about it than I do. Thoughts?
cpr 18y ago
One of the commenters on his blog hit the nail on the head: The reason you've heard of Google, Amazon, etc., is that they did have these super-hero "seed hackers" as part of their startup, so they thrived. Thus, SteveY's argument about them being necessary for every successful startup is somewhat tautological.
- aaronblohowiak 18y ago
  do not confuse causality with identity
msg 18y ago
One valuable point is that you always have holes in your education. I think Yegge's half right about not being able to interview for DGTS. There's no substitute for on-the-job judgments. On the other hand, there's a profile. Douglas Crockford, for instance, wants hackers who are friends with SICP and TAoCP. Bill Gates said something similar back in the day. http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-TBPekxc1dLNy5DOloPfzVvFIVOWMB0li?p=860 http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-TBPekxc1dLNy5DOloPfzVvFIVOWMB... I've taken Eric Raymond's hacker HOWTO as a kind of program toward DGTS. http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html Yegge has emphasized a deep understanding of compilers and languages in the past. To me the benefits are still tantalizingly out of reach. http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rich-programmer-food.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rich-programmer-food...
JuanGarcia 18y ago
The problem is that the effect he uses to support his point only applies if you're in the bottom segment [of programmers]. http://juangarcia.890m.com/blog/2008/06/17/done-and-gets-things-smart/ http://juangarcia.890m.com/blog/2008/06/17/done-and-gets-thi... JG

137 points by dill_day 18y ago

sanj 18y ago

I disagree with one of Yegge's key points: "How do you hire someone who's smarter than you? How do you tell if someone's smarter than you? This is a problem I've thought about, over nearly twenty years of interviewing, and it appears that the answer is: you can't. You just have to get lucky." Is this really the case? I feel like I've met dozens of people over the years and I can tell you that they're better programmers than me. Or more organized. Or more talents (at business, coding, wine tasting, whatever). Or just plain smarter. Is this just a question of being humbled by many talented folks? Is it that I have some hugely overvalued self worth? Do I have less of myself tied into my code? Don't get me wrong, my ego does take a small hit (though less and less over the years), and I do console myself in some small way. "Well, at least I can play the ukulele with my toes better than she can!" But, c'mon, can you really not put your own ego aside long enough to hire people to make your company successful?

narag 18y ago
I also have recognized that a handful of guys were smarter. But that's after working with them. Sometimes I realized how smart they were after I was elsewhere, found a problem that they had solved and found out how hard it was. A superheroe makes things look easy. Would I spot one of them in an interview? Not sure, but I think so. But that's just because I'm supersmart myself ;-)
lutorm 18y ago
It is the case. It's like that pg essay about how everyone recognizes how languages lower level than the one they work in are sooo primitive, but higher-level ones (ie lisp in the essay) just look weird. You just don't see what that would be good for. It's the same with insanely smart people. They just don't make sense to you, because you can't follow. If you observe their output for a while, you'll see, but from just talking to them, it'll be difficult.
- sanj 18y ago
  I still disagree. I've met lots of weird people. A small subset of them are smart. You get better at telling the difference over time.

DenisM 18y ago

warning: 5247 words.

pchristensen 18y ago
Everybody frickin' knows that Yegge writes a lot. He even wrote about how he does that on purpose. Now, lets start complaining every time pg writes an essay with no pictures.
- DenisM 18y ago
  Please point out where exactly I am complaining. And not everyone knows who this Yegge person is, much else keeps track about his writing habbits.

dhotson 18y ago

A great read. Steve Yegge is a super smart guy. I personally think his longish style is great. I like to be able to read an article for a good 20 minutes. I wish more bloggers wrote articles with as much depth and passion as Stevey. Paul Graham's tight editing style is great too.. don't get me wrong. :)

dfranke 18y ago
Agreed. It really worries me that even this crowd by-and-large doesn't have enough of an attention span to cope with Yegge. Does anyone read books any more?
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
- d0mine 18y ago
  1. "Steve's stuff strikes me as a stream-of-consciousness, spellcheck and then post, type of style." http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=219653 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=219653 2. "Mes Révérends Pères, mes lettres n'avaient pas accoutumé de se suivre de si près, ni d'être si étendues. Le peu de temps que j'ai eu a été cause de l'un et de l'autre. Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte." Bribes: Petit Dictionnaire des Citations http://www.bribes.org/temps.htm http://www.bribes.org/temps.htm A loose translation of the above quote: "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter." From 1. and 2. it follows: Succinctness takes more effort. Yegge took no effort. All other being equal a succinct text is preferable.
  - LogicHoleFlaw 18y ago
    I don't think it follows that Yegge took no effort. In fact, I suspect that the rough draft of his post was quite a bit longer. Imagine the reader shock to read that one!
yef 18y ago
Long is fine if that's what it takes to make the point. I learned to keep things as concise as possible to avoid losing the reader. The side benefit is that it forces the writer to clarify and distill his thoughts. Most of the work is done in rewriting. Steve's stuff strikes me as a stream-of-consciousness, spellcheck and then post, type of style. Do the 3rd and 4th paragraphs about jocks really contribute anything to his point?

mark_h 18y ago

Still long, but much more coherent and interesting than "Rhinos and Tigers". (I think I occasionally suffer from a second-order form of the Dunning-Kruger effect he references: I know I'm not that great... that must mean I'm more enlightened! The awareness of this doesn't help either; I think it's recursively deceiving.)

olefoo 18y ago
Come up with a witty name for this second-order effect and you too could join the ranks of the 'business consulting intelligentsia'.
dill_day 18y ago
This reminds me of Socrates: I went to one of those reputed to be wise... and when I conversed with him... it seemed to me that this man seemed to be wise, both to many other human beings and most of all to himself, but that he was not. I reasoned with regard to myself: I am wiser than this human being. For probably neither of us knows anything noble and good, but he supposes he knows something when he does not know, while I, just as I do not know, do not even suppose that I do.
michaelneale 18y ago
Coherent? Not sure about that. I can't even read this one, its just rambling. The other one was a transcription of a talk, so that explains why it reads funny. Is the summary really just as simple as its important that you hire people that get things done (firstly) but also in a smart way? Is that it?

auston 18y ago

Real eye opener for (re)evaluating yourself and the people around you.

bootload 18y ago

"... Done, and Gets Things Smart ..." I'm wondering if this is the Steve Yegge 20% time for google? Sure reads like, "come work for us ... it's one of the only way you will ever get to meet these coding gods & convince them to be co-founders" (DKE#2)

gaius 18y ago

This is one of the most valuable things about going to a good college. One day you're the top of your class at school without even trying, the next you're merely average - or maybe you (which is to say, me, in this story) need to work hard to even get to the level of average. It's a real eye-opener. Unfortunately, this effect wears off by the time you graduate, which is when you need it the most.

swombat 18y ago
Moreover, when you enter the workforce (if you do so in a normal company, not in a Google), you're once again surrounded by ... erm.. well, not incredibly brilliant people, and your arrogance comes back...
- arebop 18y ago
  Part-time grad school helps with that.
  - rcoder 18y ago
    (Note: by "helps" I assume you mean to suggest that grad school should restore the humility that the workforce fails to inspire in programmers. If that's incorrect, then we are in fact 100% in agreement.) Only if you're in the right graduate program. There are a lot of MS (and even some PhD) students in CS departments who are just looking to increase their base salary. Furthermore, I've found that taking grad-school classes part-time is kind of an unfair advantage vs. being a full-time student. While I have time to really explore the material for the one or two classes I'm taking at once, while the full-time students are carrying a heavier course load, and TA'ing or teaching at least one more class, even if they're not working on their thesis or dissertation.
    - arebop 18y ago
      Right: by "helps" I meant to suggest that grad school restores the humility lost by immersion in a lackluster workforce. Anyway, it certainly had that effect on me. I guess I was in the right graduate program, because I think nearly all of my fellow students were there primarily for the intellectual stimulation and learning. I haven't heard anyone talking about increased earning power, and I certainly didn't expect to earn more with my degree. Sometimes I thought it would probably be easier to be a full-time student, because they don't have to commute to work or schedule around meetings and other work obligations (including the occasional death march). I believe that it's hard work being a PhD student, but I'm not so sure the full time MSCS students have it any harder than the part-timers who have to balance a corporate job.

danw 18y ago

Reminds me of this graph: http://media.tumblr.com/LTrEP2xA77v9i9w1wGBRQSjV_400.jpg http://media.tumblr.com/LTrEP2xA77v9i9w1wGBRQSjV_400.jpg (Originally from http://blog.gardeviance.org/2008/04/three-stages-of-expertise.html http://blog.gardeviance.org/2008/04/three-stages-of-expertis... but images aren't loading on his blog)

eru 18y ago
For me images do load on the blog.

Tichy 18y ago

So what percentage of hackers are superhackers? Did the rockstar job ads of YC startups get many applications (and where the applicants really rockstar coders)?

narag 18y ago

Who do you think that Google superheroe is?

l0stman 18y ago
Craig Silverstein?
- shimon 18y ago
  Seems like a good guess based on http://news.cnet.com/2008-1024_3-5208228.html http://news.cnet.com/2008-1024_3-5208228.html
cpr 18y ago
Another theory is Jeff Dean: http://research.google.com/people/jeff/index.html http://research.google.com/people/jeff/index.html .
- snprbob86 18y ago
  I'm almost certain it is Jeff Dean. During my 3 month internship at Google, his name came up EVERYWHERE. 1) He is a primary author on all of Google's major infrastructure-related publications (BigTable, MapReduce, etc) 2) I've seen his internal resume. It is CRAZY. 3) Just for fun/learning I took some time and wrote an internal web app which produced pie graphs showing peoples line counts navigable by directory. I didn't run it on the entire code base because Perforce is a dog, but what I did run it on, he dominated. 4) There is an internal web app listing Chuck Norris -style Jeff Dean facts. I learned that when Jeff Dean launches his profiler, loops unroll themselves in fear. That man is certainly Done, and Gets Things Smart. In fact, he has been 40 times more Done ever since he upgraded his keyboard to USB 2.0. Not to mention that during downtime, he alone handles all Google searches by hand.
  - AndyKelley 18y ago
    I want more Jeff Dean "facts"!

steveplace 18y ago

Quote: "That's right! All those loser kneebiter jocks in high school who played varsity and got all the girls and sported their big, winning, shark-white smiles as they barely jee-parlor-fran-saysed their way through the classes you coasted through: where are they now?" I'm a programmer, actually. edit: I was recruited by Miami, Alabama, Wake Forest, and a couple others, and had the potential to be one of the top tight ends in the state of Florida. Too bad I couldn't deal with the people.

BrandonM 18y ago
Interestingly, you seem to be admitting in the last sentence there that you are an outlier. Otherwise, I posit that you could deal with the people.
- steveplace 18y ago
  I'm great with people. I just have little patience for poor management, and that's exactly what it was.

dreish 18y ago

One of the key details I like in this essay is that these people Yegge is referring to are experienced. That implies that for 95% of us, this is something we can still aspire to be someday. ("Every once in a very rare while you'll get a recent college grad in this category, but I think more often they tend to be experienced enough to make Gandalf feel young again.") (Incidentally, Yegge has probably done more to advance the art of speed-reading among programmers than any other single individual. Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

wensing 18y ago

I know a couple of DGTSers--two, to be precise. And the one introduced me to the other as 'he's smarter than me--I might write code quickly, but his code is beautiful.' I still can't comprehend that, but I accept it as true. My analogy for some of this is the tall-building problem (really, just perspective). Looking up at two skyscrapers, can you tell which one is taller? Sometimes. Other times they both just trail off into the sky and you're incapable of observing that one is a full 20, 30, 40 stories taller than the other. So it goes with smart people--that is, people that are less smart than you are going to think you're smart (and tell you so), but that's because they have no idea how tall the building next to you is. "If you only knew Isaac, then you wouldn't call me smart!". Actually, they probably would, because they can't even appreciate those extra levels of smartness.

gills 18y ago
My version of this has always been that some people are as smart relative to myself as I am to my cat. There's no way I can even comprehend the chasm between us.
- parbo 18y ago
  The cat is most certainly smarter than you. It gets you to go to work and bring home food to it, while it sleeps twenty hours per day and spends the remaining four licking itself.
  - leoc 18y ago
    Where did it get its MBA?
  - gills 18y ago
    You're right. I should find a way to turn the tables ;).

AndyKelley 18y ago

Reading things like this makes me feel guilty for spending so much time reading blogs and not enough time actually creating anything.

astine 18y ago
And commenting on them!

Xichekolas 18y ago

> "Heck, the Markov-chain synopses of my blogs that people post in quasi-jest tend to look like I wrote them." ... Someone has been reading Hacker News.

hello_moto 18y ago

What's wrong with VP, Bank Manager, or whatnot? Not everybody wants to be a programmer. In fact, it is perceived that programmer has no life, awkward in social situation, and tend to have a child with autism.

astine 18y ago
I think that it was a subtle joke about how programmers tend to view non-programmers. -- Or it was a joke about how these people aren't really losers after all. Either way, it was a subtle snub on the 'cool to be a geek' thing and how programmer's arrogance can be their downfall. It leads up to the DK affect discussion, which is the second point of the article, we aren't as smart as we think they are and other people are smarter than we think they are.
- hello_moto 18y ago
  Ah I see. Pardon my ignorance for not reading the whole thing and understanding the implicit points behind it.

figured 18y ago

I always enjoy reading essays that make me feel unconformable, it usually means that the author is forcing me to think.

andreyf 18y ago

PG: I think Paul Graham is probably a DGTSer; I mean, looking at his code in "ANSI Common Lisp" and "On Lisp", it's pretty clear that he's on a different plane of existence from me, and I've learned a ton from him. So he probably has more useful things to say about it than I do. Thoughts?

cpr 18y ago

One of the commenters on his blog hit the nail on the head: The reason you've heard of Google, Amazon, etc., is that they did have these super-hero "seed hackers" as part of their startup, so they thrived. Thus, SteveY's argument about them being necessary for every successful startup is somewhat tautological.

aaronblohowiak 18y ago
do not confuse causality with identity

msg 18y ago

One valuable point is that you always have holes in your education. I think Yegge's half right about not being able to interview for DGTS. There's no substitute for on-the-job judgments. On the other hand, there's a profile. Douglas Crockford, for instance, wants hackers who are friends with SICP and TAoCP. Bill Gates said something similar back in the day. http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-TBPekxc1dLNy5DOloPfzVvFIVOWMB0li?p=860 http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-TBPekxc1dLNy5DOloPfzVvFIVOWMB... I've taken Eric Raymond's hacker HOWTO as a kind of program toward DGTS. http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html Yegge has emphasized a deep understanding of compilers and languages in the past. To me the benefits are still tantalizingly out of reach. http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rich-programmer-food.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rich-programmer-food...

JuanGarcia 18y ago

The problem is that the effect he uses to support his point only applies if you're in the bottom segment [of programmers]. http://juangarcia.890m.com/blog/2008/06/17/done-and-gets-things-smart/ http://juangarcia.890m.com/blog/2008/06/17/done-and-gets-thi... JG